This was an intriguing one. The art is good, the medium is good, and the story was... jarring. It's just that players in general like control, agency, and all that. With this, I was just watching most of it happen, and what choices were there, were all dialogue-based and less consequential than you'd expect a choice in general to be within something of the visual novel kind. Otherwise it just seemed like you decided the narrative (okay) and found it acceptable to only allow variation up to a point that may not feel satisfying because there's little payoff (needs a bit more work). Maybe you could have tied more consequence to the existing dialogue choices, or! added action choices (deciding what Lila does instead of just what she says or thinks). Good try though!

(i played this with lennychip!)

absolutely adored the animated pixel art sprites, and how kinda natural they looked. kinda crazy that u had time to do all of that, its so impressive!! while i do think the backgrounds couldve done with more work (and acknowledge that thats probably unrealistic given the nature of the jam), i kinda like the filters u put on the pre-existing ones. kinda reminds me of how Higurashi and Umineko used to do their backgrounds haha!!

the dialogue and banter between lila and eli was rly cute!! it felt rly natural and kinda reminds me myself of how id talk to some of my close friends... the twist at the end was kind of unexpected but also kinda welcome,, i guess thats just how it goes sometimes BHWSHKFD

super good stuff :D

ohhh, i really liked this. the sprites were really cool -- animated no less, whew! that really made them feel alive. loved the conversations between the two. i do feel they were realistic. i talk like that with my bestie too. LOL

[SPOILERS BELOW]

the end did catch me a bit off guard but not necessarily in a bad way. the slice-of-life nature, i think, was instrumental to the twist... sometimes that's just how it goes. maybe it'd hit even harder on replay, too. 

(relatedly, i really enjoyed the slice-of-life, regardless of the twist LMAO. it was cute! their conversations were fun to follow!)

i guess if anything, my only real criticisms are:

1) i wish there was more that hinted at eli's fate, and

2) i really was not a fan of the wait between lines. it disrupted the flow a bit too much, and i'd always click before the dialogue was over, which made it skip to the next sentence, then i'd have to rollback to see the rest of the sentence, etc... i feel it'd be more beneficial to make it a click-to-continue rather than a wait, for the sake of pacing.

ANYWAY! really enjoyed this. i want to learn more about lila and eli :^)

Heyo! My bf and I played this game around the same time, so some of these thoughts are from him. I figured I might as well just combine our comments together!

Things we liked:

* Characters are very animated and alive!

* The use of real life places as backgrounds we thought was really cute

* The dynamics between Eli and Lila are great and we think they're funny.

Our main constructive comment:

* The writing as a whole feels medyo... magulo. It's a slice of life, except nothing noteworthy really happens. I think you might want to go back to the fundamentals of storytelling. A plot is a series of events, while a story (or fabula) is a series of causally linked events. It means one event is the cause of the next, and so on. The events that take place in this game don't really lead to anywhere. Even the pasalubong-buying (which is most of the story) has no real pay-off because the ending skips in time to... you know.

We hope you take this in good faith. We believe in you, and we think you're capable of improving and being really really good. Be proud of what you've made; congrats on participating and we wish you the best.

[SPOILERS]

I felt like I was third-wheeling and just watching a couple banter the whole time. It really captured that mundane everyday feeling of hanging out with a friend, or third-wheeling your friend and their partner. Somewhere in the middle, I was thinking it felt a bit too ordinary. You know, it reminded me of the kind of conversations and moments you’d experience in high school or college.

When the ending came though, it completely caught me off guard. I thought the story would end after they picked out the pasalubong based on our choices. I didn’t expect Eli to die at all, it came out of nowhere. But I think that’s also what made it feel realistic, because things like that really do happen out of nowhere in real life. I like how the writer handled it. Even though it felt a bit slow-paced for me, I get why it was written that way.

I also really liked how each character had a lot of animated expressions. It made the dialogue feel much more alive. I do think it would’ve been even better if the backgrounds were originally drawn, or at least edited a bit more, but I understand the time for the jam was limited.

One thing that did put me off was how the dialogue appeared one sentence at a time instead of letter by letter or word by word. There were some moments where it worked well, but for most of the game it made the dialogue feel a bit clunky.